Eberron: Soaring Skies of Khorvaire

On the wings of adventure! (Skyship now included!)

The Road Home

You can see the way out of the Mirrorverse! You just need to decide how to get there.

9

FEB/13

You dive into the instruction manual to the demote detonator described to you by mirror!Burzam and mirror!Dr. Flint! And hoo-boy is it immediately evident that mirror!Burzam’s a different creature for yours. His verbosity is second to none, and once his vocabulary has pounded you into submission, it just keeps on trundling over you and running roughshod over your beleaguered reflex to reach for the dictionary. Mirror!Dr. Flint’s annotations don’t much help either, as his putting things into laymen’s terms is foiled by his utter lack of understanding of the material he’s translating.

From what you can make out of the jargon and “helpful hints fer understandin’,” the remote detonator of the Hand of Wrath is essentially a magical battery attached to an interface with which to connect to Dulum: Once connected, a confirmation signal is activated – via a big red button — that initiates the Hand of Wrath’s self-destruct protocols. As part of those protocols, the Moonbreaker cycles through a firing cycle aimed at the source of the confirmation signal, whose coordinates are uploaded at the time of the confirmation of the self-destruct’s initiation.

The schematics contain detailed descriptions of dozens of components, though most of these mirror!Burzam is confident House Cannith can produce in a timely manner, and your own Burzam grumbles he could do himself with a tenth of the budget his mirrorverse counterpart is quoting. The one stumbling block appears to be the battery to power the remote detonator. Per mirror!Dr. Flint’s commentary, as a supplemental security measure to ensure that Dulum was only destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion by her own, the Hand of Wrath requires a massive infusion of magic in order to “kick-start” it when utilized via the remote detonator. Mirror!Burzam is confident that an eldritch engine could be built to spec and transported to the appropriate site in approximately three-months, though he admits that time could be of the essence. The notes make the grizzly observation that it was expected, in the event of Dulum becoming compromised, that a disciple of Nonnagron – like Delthan — was expected to escape, construct a remote detonator, and sacrifice himself to fuel the activation.

Without constructing an eldritch engine from scratch, the notes give sizable shrift to improvising a power source out of a magical item of sufficient potency. Mirror!Burzam, while surrounded by such artifacts, neglected to send any along, though he is confident that the Argentum must surely have something that will do the trick, as they’re in the business of collecting such things. Though artifacts of such power might also be expropriated from other sources: For instance, somewhere within what was once the volcanic caldera that was once known as the Lake of Fire, now the headquarters of the Burning Legion, is something of monumental power which draws Fernia into an unnatural and permanently coterminous orbit.

In their discussion about the Lake of Fire, there is also a tangent of mirror!Burzam’s based upon records dug out of some archive whose name hurts to pronounce. Remembering the Nightmare War, the giants of Dulum had considered the possibility of another invasion by an extraplanar army while another plane was coterminous with Eberron. Included within the schematics supplied is what mirror!Burzam calls a “targeting module”, a device that allows for the activator of the Hand of Wrath to select which plane(s) of existence the Moonbreaker uses to do its dirty work. As the device requires a specially forged component attuned to each plane of existence to be used, Mirror!Burzam speculates that by plugging in the elemental residuum of a sufficiently powerful denizen of Fernia, it would be possible to ablate its becoming coterminous and even – potentially – throw it off its original orbit and send it hurtling off into planar the abyss. A thought also occurs for your purposes: As the Moonbreaker is the method for returning home, plugging in The Key for the component attuned to the Prime Material Plane should work to send you home when the Moonbreaker targets you, making being blown up after activating the remote detonator a feature, not a bug.

All of this talk of powerful artifacts also gets Talagos’mahrin’s ready to blow up a city full of mindhacked dragons, crazy elves, and the long-dead ghost-empress of giantkind! He apparently totally knows a guy who can hook the party up with the power source and attuned extraplanar components they need! There’s just one slight problem: Said guy is in Argonnessen. Which means he’s probably not so much a “guy” as a “male dragon”. Said guy is also Talagos’mahrin’s father-in-law. Which surely won’t be at all awkward for the World’s Most Interesting Dragon! And besides, you guys have always wanted to go to Argonnessen. This is clearly a chance to get intel on what to expect back home.

You have four paths before you, brave party, to move forward:
1) Continue to Dulum as planned and confront the evils that lay within.
2) Stay on Xen’drik and attempt to build the remote detonator using Delthan to activate the Hand of Wrath.
3) Return to Khorvaire and attempt to build the remote detonator using components extracted from House Cannith, the Argentum, Burning Legion, and/or something you come up with yourselves.
4) Venture to Argonnessen and attempt to build the remote detonator using components extracted from the Continent of Dragons.